It is as we all feared. Stephen Colbert threw his considerable legal acumen into the ring last night, weighing in on NRDC v. Winter – our case about naval sonar training off California, which the Supreme Court will hear in the fall. Needless to say, whales seem about ready to join bears on Mr. Colbert’s enemies list.
Colbert cast a cold eye on the deaths attributed to the Navy’s exercises. “So now sound kills whales?” he asked derisively. “What doesn’t kill whales? Harpoons? Pollution? Queequeg?” And he issued a stern warning to the cetacean crowd: “Stop dying or you’ll find yourselves in Gitmo getting airboarded.” Most cutting of all, perhaps, was his coinage of the phrase “blubber huggers,” the utterance of which caused his lower lip to vibrate dramatically.
Colbert also had some choice things to say about the Exxon Valdez case (Exxon v. Baker), speaking as “a friend of the captain, Joe Hazelwood.”